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Switching USB HDD from Mac to Windows PC

xfm

Posted 23 December 2008 - 03:46 PM

I have had a 500GB Maxtor USB HDD on my Mac Mini running OSX 10.4. I have recently purchased a 1TB LaCie USB HDD for the Mac and would like to use the 500GB Maxtor on my Windows Vista PC.

I have transferred all of my Mac data from the old Maxtor to the new LaCie. I have looked for options on the Mac to reformat the old Maxtor drive so that I can use it on my PC, but it is not clear what I need to do. I have been unable to find a straightforward 'Reformat' command on the mac and my PC does not recognize the drive when I plug it in the USB port.

Can anyone provide guidance as to the procedures to get this drive reformatted for use on a Windows Vista PC?

xfm

Posted 24 December 2008 - 11:25 AM

You do not need to reformat it!!! You can use MAC drive on PC via USB but you need proper driver installed to support it.

try for example

macdrive_7.2.2 it works fine. I didn't test it on Vista but on XP64 works perfectly

Thanks for the suggestion, dji

But I checked. Macdrive costs $50. I only paid $89 for the drive I'm trying to reuse. Not a good value proposition in my opinion.

Plus I don't mind reformatting since all data has been transferred to the new Mac 1TB drive. In fact, reformatting is preferred since this drive will live the rest of its life on my Windows PC. I do not anticipate any future Mac/PC drive swapping with this drive

What I think I really need is either:

A way to reformat the drive to NTFS on the Mac (I understand FAT32 has a 4GB file size limit)

OR

Get the Windows PC to recognize the existence of the USB drive so I could reformat it on the PC.

Any ideas? Can I use Macdrive free trial to get the drive recognized on the PC, and then reformat to NTFS?

dji

Posted 24 December 2008 - 12:24 PM

dji

Member

Member

27 posts

If you want to reformat it you can use Disk Management console from windows to repartition drive (if you wish) and reformat it to NTFS with custom Block Size. It works perfect.

Just go to controlPanel->AdministrativeTools->ComputerManagement
On the left side in the tree select Disk Management
In right window you will see partitions of all your drives in the system (there should be one unrecognized if your USB drive is connected)
Select that partition, right click and chose delete partition (if you want to repartition it and then create new partition) then convert disk to MBR (do not use dynamic disk for USB storage) format it using NTFS and enjoy.